The Ball demo, Interesting action-puzzler Options

[Tanegar]

So I downloaded the demo for this game The Ball, and I have to say it's pretty interesting. It's not quite on the level of Portal, but I doubt we'll see that game's equal for quite some time. Think of the Companion Cube level, only the Cube is a Ball, a big (taller than you) metal ball that you can either attract or hammer away from you with a gizmo you pick up early on. It's set in a very Indiana Jones-esque Mayincatec underground ruin. The basic gameplay is pretty simple: you push and/or pull the titular Ball around to push buttons, move moveable objects, break breakable objects, and crush mummies (more on that in a minute). Some of the puzzles are more complex: one in the demo requires you to push the Ball into a pool of oil to coat it in the stuff, then roll it across the floor to create a trail to the fuse of a bomb, then roll the Ball over a torch to set the oil trail on fire, light the fuse, and set off the bomb to clear a passage. Overall the puzzles seem to embrace this kind of easily graspable logic rather than, say, requiring you to figure out that you're supposed to stick the torch up a monkey's ass to make it spit fire on the fuse. I consider this a major selling point in a puzzle game.

Combat is really where the game falls down. Your only weapon is the Ball. You have to maneuver it around to crush enemies; sometimes you have to use the Ball in conjunction with environmental elements, like electrifying it with a pair of Tesla coils (in an ancient temple? Ooookayyyy...) and rolling it into a pool of water to electrocute a giant caterpillar. Yes, that's also in the demo. Unfortunately, the kind of precision this requires is somewhat tricky to pull off, and the situation is not helped by the fact that you can't take more than a few hits before going down like a cheap hooker. Fortunately, there's not a lot of combat, so you will only occasionally feel a burning urge to tear out your own eyes.

Bottom line: If you like first-person puzzle games in the general vein of Portal and need something to tide you over while you wait for Portal 2, The Ball is worth a look. Try the demo first, though.